NY TIMES: GORE GLOBAL WARMING WRONG
By J. Grant Swank Jr. (01/08/08)
Al Gore’s global warming sermon is wrong, per New York Times columnist John Tierney as highlighted by the Newsmax Staff.
Media gives public selective Gore-leaning reportage. Per Tierney, the same media sidelines scientific data that directly contradicts Gore’s litany.
Many have questioned the Gore convictions; yet the intelligentsia has regarded these free thinkers as offbeat, old-fashioned cultural lags.
Now none other than the New York Times starts 2008 debunking Gore and his entourage. Tierney claims that news reports show bears scampering for ice bricks while the facts relating to the larger picture are purposefully ignored.
After all, will not the weeping public pant for bears to find a homeplace? Surely. Then why tell the world population truth when the media can squeeze out a tear or two or three?
"When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming.
“When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed," Tierney noted.”
Newsmax reports: “Slow warming, Tierney explains, ‘doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an ‘availability cascade,’ a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California.
“The ‘availability cascade,’ Tierney writes, ‘is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear.
“’Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.’"
Tierney provides argument after argument supporting his thesis that Gore’s global warming put-up is nothing but incorrect. Supported by a willing newsfeed, Gore’s cadre has convinced the thinking public that political correctness demands the knee-jerk posture.
To disagree with Gore’s global warming bit in most social gatherings today is to play the fool. No more after digesting Tierney’s position paper made daily newspaper read.
Newsmax continues: “Once such a cascade is under way, Tierney adds ‘it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do.
“’Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there’s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting — or why the globe’s other pole isn’t melting, too.’"
The reading public now has filed away enough photo images as well as Gore cliches to make it clear that global warming is gospel. To counter is to recite heresy. The Tierneys of the printing world should change all this if the same reading public is on its toes.
“While Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, Tierney explains, ‘they’re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents.’
“He cites two studies by NASA and university scientists last year that he reports ‘concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention — and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.’”
Informed scientists who disagree with Gore are slighted by media and politically correct politicians. As they remain irritated by such shunning, they thankfully are still studied by the persistent researchers. Now Tierney brings these shunted experts to the fore.
“Tierney writes that Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, ‘recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming.
“He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.
"’Guess which paper jibed with the theory — and image of Katrina — presented by Al Gore ’s “Inconvenient Truth”?’
“The answer: ‘the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December — by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.
“Tierney recalls that in his speech accepting the Peace Prize, Gore ‘didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate.’ Nor, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been in his roundup of the 2007 weather.
“Instead, Tierney notes, ‘he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”’
How convenient. How sensitive of Gore to note secretly his opposition while purposefully sliding his enemy’s position under the proverbial rug.
How would the media-lynched public know the facts as to what Gore was opportunistically doing?
“’In the last few months,’ Mr. Gore said, 'it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.'
“’But he was being too modest,’ Tierney says, adding, ‘Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.’"
A word to the wise is sufficient.
Read NY Times: “Global Warming Claims Bogus” at http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/NY_Times:_Global_Warming_/2008/01/01/60981.html?s=al&promo_code=422C-1
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